I like this judge.

These moral panics are fodder for political primates in the Conservative party. When the Reagan Administration dominated the airwaves in the 1980s and started all this Christian Doomerism, the major media really sucked off the Reaganite platform.

I'd guess most of y'all are too young to remember the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Reagan worshippers were convinced that there was a nationwide secret Satanic plot to abuse and kill children taking place in basements and secret locations all over the U.S. There were only a few major media formats (CBS, NBC, and ABC mostly) and they all reported constantly on these secret Satanists and how they were hiding secret messages in music, invading the brains of children through Dungeons & Dragons, and abusing children in secret rituals. The Satanic Panic got endless news coverage, and good Conservative Christians everywhere were constantly vigilant against all the secret Satanism in their midst. They picketed school boards, scanned their children's media consumption for secret subliminal Satanic penises (seriously), and so on.

And here's the kicker ... NONE of it was real. Hours of news coverage, daytime talk show discussions, pages upon pages of ink in major newspapers, and NOT ONE OUNCE of it had any actual evidence behind it.

This was the beginning of the political/media landscape we're all trapped in now. The gameplan never changed.

p.s. and this was of course all topped off by major media news coverage that referred to AIDS as 'gay cancer' repeatedly, all in line with the anti-gay dictates of Reagan himself repeating that the U.S. was going to turn into Sodom & Gomorrah because of all the gayness hiding in suburban closets.